Manhattan Noir 2

by Lawrence Block

  I catch the swift side glance she darts at the fifth of rye on the side table.

  “No, it didn’t come out of that. It’s just an impulse—came out of my heart, I suppose you could say. Either take it or don’t take it, but don’t spoil it.”

  “But why? What for?”

  “Does there have to be a reason for everything? Sometimes there isn’t.”

  “I’ll buy her a new coat,” she says huskily. “A new pink coat like little girls all seem to want. With a little baby muff of lamb’s wool to go with it. And I’ll say a prayer for you when I take her to church with me next Sunday.”

  It won’t work, but—“Make it a good one.”

  The last part is all she hears.

  Something occurs to me. “You won’t have to do any explaining to her father, will you?”

  “She has no father,” she says quite simply. “She’s never had. There’s only me and her, sir.”

  Somehow I can tell by the quick chip-chop of her feet away from my door that it’s not lost time she’s trying to make up; it’s the tears starting in her eyes that she wants to hide.

  I slosh a little rye into a glass—a fresh glass, not the one before; they get rancid from your downbreaths that cling like a stale mist around the inner rim. But it’s no help; I know that by now, and I’ve been dousing myself in it for three days. It just doesn’t take hold. I think fear neutralizes alcohol, weakens its anesthetic power. It’s good for small fears; your boss, your wife, your bills, your dentist; all right then to take a drink. But for big ones it doesn’t do any good. Like water on blazing gasoline, it will only quicken and compound it. It takes sand, in the literal and the slang sense, to smother the bonfire that is fear. And if you’re out of sand, then you must burn up.

  I have it out now, paying it off between my fingers like a rosary of murder. Those same fingers that did it to her. For three days now I’ve taken it out at intervals, looked at it, then hidden it away again. Each time wondering if it really happened, hoping that it didn’t, dreading that it did.

  It’s a woman’s scarf; that much I know about it. And that’s about all. But whose? Hers? And how did I come by it? How did it get into the side pocket of my jacket, dangling on the outside, when I came in here early Wednesday morning in some sort of traumatic daze, looking for room walls to hide inside of as if they were a folding screen. (I didn’t even know I had it there; the bellboy who was checking me in spotted it on the way up in the elevator, grinned, and said something about a “heavy date.”)

  It’s flimsy stuff, but it has a great tensile strength when pulled against its grain. The strength of the garotte. It’s tinted in pastel colors that blend, graduate, into one another, all except one. It goes from a flamingo pink to a peach tone and then to a still paler flesh tint—and then suddenly an angry, jagged splash of blood color comes in, not even like the others. Not smooth, not artificed by some loom or by some dye vat. Like a star, like the scattered petals of a flower. Speaking of—I don’t know how to say it—speaking of violence, of struggle, of life spilled out.

  The blood isn’t red anymore. It’s rusty brown now. But it’s still blood, all the same. Ten years from now, twenty, it’ll still be blood; faded out, vanished, the pollen of, the dust of, blood. What was once warm and moving. And made blushes and rushed with anger and paled with fear. Like that night—I can still see her eyes. They still come before me, wide and white and glistening with fright, out of the amnesiac darkness of our sudden, unpremeditated meeting.

  They were like two pools of fear. She saw something that I couldn’t see. And fear kindled in them. I feared and I mistrusted but I couldn’t bear to see my fear reflected in her eyes. From her I wanted reassurance, consolation; only wanted to draw her close to me and hold her to me, to lean my head against her and rest and draw new belief in myself. Instead she met my fear with her fear. Eyes that should have been tender were glowing with unscreaming fear.

  It wasn’t an attack. We’d been together too many times before, made love together too many times before, for it to be that. It was just that fear had suddenly entered, and made us dangerous strangers.

  She turned and tried to run. I caught the scarf from behind. Only in supplication, in pleading; trying to hold on to the only one who could save me. And the closer I tried to draw her to me, the less she was alive. Until finally I got her all the way back to me, where I wanted her to be, and she was dead.

  I hadn’t wanted that. It was only love, turned inside out. It was only loneliness, outgoing.

  And now I’m alone, without any love.

  And the radio, almost as if it were taking my pulse count, electrographing my heartbeats, echoes them back to me: For, like caressing an empty glove, Is night without some love, The night was made for—

  The hotel room ashtrays are thick glass cubes, built to withstand cracking under heat of almost any degree. I touch my lighter to it, to the scarf compressed inside the cube. The flame points upward like a sawtoothed orange knife. There goes love. After a while it stops burning. It looks like a black cabbage, each leaf tipped by thin red lines that waver and creep back and forth like tiny red worms. Then one by one they go out.

  I dump it into the bathroom bowl and flip the lever down. What a hell of a place for your love to wind up. Like something disembowled.

  I go back and pour out a little more. It’s the seat belt against the imminent smash-up, the antidote for terror, the prescription against panic. Only it doesn’t work. I sit there dejectedly, wrists looping down between my legs. I’m confused; I can’t think it out. Something inside my mind keeps fogging over, like mist on a windshield. I use the back of my hand for a windshield wiper and draw it slowly across my forehead a couple times, and it clears up again for a little while.

  “Remember,” the little radio prattles. “Simple headache, take aspirin. Nervous tension, take—”

  All I can say to myself is: there is no fix for the fix you’re in now.

  Suddenly the phone peals, sharp and shattering as the smashing of glass sealing up a vacuum. I never knew a sound could be so frightening, never knew a sound could be so dire. It’s like a short circuit in my nervous system. Like springing a cork in my heart with a lopsided opener. Like a shot of sodium pentathol up my arm knocking out my will power.

  All I keep thinking is: this is it. Here it is. It’s not a hotel-service call, it can’t be, not at this hour anymore. The waiter’s been and gone, the night maid’s been and gone. It can’t be an outside call, because nobody on the outside knows I’m here in the hotel. Not even where I work, where I used to work, they don’t know. This is it; it’s got to be.

  How will they put it? A polite summons. “Would you mind coming down for a minute, sir?” And then if I do, a sudden preventive twisting of my arm behind my back as I step out of the elevator, an unnoticeable flurry tactfully covered up behind the backs of the bellboys—then quickly out and away.

  Why don’t they come right up here to my door and get me? Is it because this is a high-class hotel on a high-class street? Maybe they don’t want any commotion in the hall, for the sake of the other guests. Maybe this is the way they always do it.

  Meanwhile it keeps ringing and ringing and ringing.

  The damp zigzag path my spilled drink made, from where I was to where I am now, is slowly soaking into the carpet and darkening it. The empty glass, dropped on the carpet, has finished rocking on its side by now and lies still. And I’ve fallen motionless into the grotesque posture of a badly frightened kid. Almost prone along the floor, legs sprawled out in back of me in scissors formation, just the backs of my two hands grasping the edge of the low stand the phone sits on, and the rim of it cutting across the bridge of my nose so that just two big staring, straining eyes show up over the top.

  And it rings on and on and on.

  Then all at once an alternative occurs to me. Maybe it’s a wrong-number call, meant for somebody else. Somebody in another room, or somebody in this room who was in it before I came. Hote
l switchboards are overworked places: slip-ups like that can happen now and then.

  I bet I haven’t said a prayer since I finished my grammar-school final-exam paper in trigonometry (and flunked it; maybe that’s why I haven’t said a prayer since), and that was more a crossed-fingers thing held behind my back than a genuine prayer. I say one now. What a funny thing to pray for. I bet nobody ever prayed for a wrong number before, not since telephones first began. Or since prayers first began, either.

  Please, make it a mistake and not for me. Make it a mistake.

  Suddenly there’s open space between the cradle and the receiver, and I’ve done it. I’ve picked it up. It’s just as easy as pulling out one of your own teeth by the roots.

  The prayer gets scratched. The call is for me, it’s not a wrong number. For me, all right, every inch of the way. I can tell from the opening words. Only—it’s not the one I feared; it’s friendly, a friendly call no different from what other people get.

  A voice from another world, almost. Yet I know it so well. Always like this, never a cloud on it; always jovial, always noisy. When a thing should be said softly, it says it loudly; when a thing should be said loudly, it says it louder still. He never identifies himself, never has to. Once you’ve heard his voice, you’ll always know him.

  That’s Johnny for you—the pal of a hundred parties. The bar-kick of scores of binges. The captain of the second-string team in how many foursome one-night stands? Every man has had a Johnny in his life sometime or other.

  He says he’s been calling my apartment since Wednesday and no answer: what happened to me?

  I play it by ear. “Water started to pour down through the ceiling, so I had to clear out till they get it repaired…. No, I’m not on a tear…. No, there’s nobody with me, I’m by myself…. Do I? Sound sort of peculiar? No, I’m all right there’s nothing the matter, not a thing.”

  I pass my free hand across the moist glisten on my forehead. It’s tough enough to be in a jam, but it’s tougher still to be in one and not be able to say you are.

  “How did you know I was here? How did you track me to this place? … You went down the yellow pages, hotel by hotel, alphabetically. Since three o’clock yesterday afternoon? … Something to tell me?”

  His new job had come through. He starts on Monday. With a direct line, and two, count ’em, two secretaries, not just one. And the old bunch is giving him a farewell party. A farewell party to end all farewell parties. Sardi’s, on 44th. Then they’ll move on later to some other place. But they’ll wait here at Sardi’s for me to catch up. Barb keeps asking, Why isn’t your best-man-to-be here with us?

  The noise of the party filters through into my ear. Ice clicking like dice in a fast-rolling game. Mixing sticks sounding like tiny tin flutes as they beat against glass. The laughter of girls, the laughter of men. Life is for the living, not the already dead.

  “Sure, I’ll be there. Sure.”

  If I say I won’t be—and I won’t, because I can’t—he’ll never quit pestering and calling me the rest of the night. So I say that I will, to get off the hook. But how can I go there, drag my trouble before his party, before his friends, before his girl? And if I go, it’ll just happen there instead of here. Who wants a grandstand for his downfall? Who wants bleachers for his disgrace?

  Johnny’s gone now, and the night goes on.

  Now the evening’s at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there’s a lull—like the calm in the eye of a hurricane—before the reverse tide starts to set in.

  The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Danny’s and Lindy’s—yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go—and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from—and that’s home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: New York, New York, it’s a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery’s down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground—

  Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it’s a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart; and as Johnny Carson’s face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. There’s a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again.

  Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. It’s an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch; from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it’s ever going to get.

  This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. The blue hours; when guys’ nerves get tauter and women’s fears get greater. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. And as the windows on the Late Show title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, There’s a life that’s happening here—

  In the pin-drop silence a taxi comes up with an unaccompanied girl in it. I can tell it’s a taxi, I can tell it’s a girl, and I can tell she’s unaccompanied; I can tell all three just by her introductory remark.

  “Benny,” she says, “will you come over and pay this for me?”

  Benny is the hotel night-service man. I know his name; he brought drinks up to the room last night.

  As the taxi drives away paid, Benny reminds her with aloof dignity, “You didn’t give me my cut last week.” Nothing personal, strictly business, you understand.

  “I had a virus week before last,” she explains. “And it took me all last week to pay off on my doctor bills. I’ll square it with you tonight.” Then she adds apprehensively, “I’m afraid he’ll hurt me.” Not her doctor, obviously.

  “Na, he won’t hurt you,” Benny reassures.

  “How would you know?” she asks, not unreasonably.

  Benny culls from his store of call-girl-sponsorship experience. “These big guys never hurt you. They’re meek as mice. It’s the little shrimps got the sting.”

  She goes ahead in. A chore is a chore, she figures.

  This of course is what is known in hotel-operational jargon as a “personal call.” In the earthier slang of the night bellmen and deskmen it is simply a “fix” or a “fix-up.” The taxi fare, of course, will go down on the guest’s bill, as “Misc.” or “Sundries.” Which actually is what it is. From my second-floor window I can figure it all out almost without any sound track to go with it.

  So much for the recreational side of night life in the upper-bracket-income hotels of Manhattan. And in its root-origins the very word itself is implicit with implication: re-create. Analyze it and you’ll see it also means to reproduce. But clever, ingenious Man has managed to sidetrack it into making life more livable.

  The wafer of ice riding the surface of my drink has melted freakishly in its middle and not around its edges and now looks like an onion ring. Off in the distance an ambulance starts bansheeing with that new broken-blast siren they use, scalp-crimping as the cries of pain of a partly dismembered hog. Somebody dead in the night? Somebody sick and going to be dead soon? Or maybe somebody going to be alive soon—did she wait too long to start for the hospital?

  All of a sudden, with the last sound there’s been all night, I can tell they’re here. Don’t ask me how, I only know they’re here. It’s beginning at last. No way out, no way aside and no way back.

  Being silent is their business, and they know their business well. They make le
ss sound than the dinner cart crunching along the carpeted hall, than Ginny’s stifled sob when I gave her that hundred-dollar bill, than the contestants bickering over the taxi. Or that girl who was down there just a little while ago on her errand of fighting loneliness for a fee.

  How can I tell that they’re here? By the absence of sound more than by its presence. Or I should say by the absence of a complementary sound—the sound that belongs with another sound and yet fails to accompany it.

  Like:

  There’s no sound of arrival, but suddenly two cars are in place down there along the hotel front. They must have come up on the glide, as noiselessly as a sailboat skimming over still water. No sound of tires, no sound of brakes. But there’s one sound they couldn’t quite obliterate—the cushioned thump of two doors closing after them in quick succession, staccato succession, as they spilled out and siphoned into the building. You can always tell a car door, no other door sounds quite like it.

  There’s only one other sound, a lesser one, a sort of follow-up: the scratch of a single sole against the abrasive sidewalk as they go hustling in. He either put it down off-balance or swiveled it too acutely in treading at the heels of those in front of him. Which is a good average, just one to sound off, considering that six or eight pairs of them must have been all going in at the same time and moving fast.

  I’ve sprung to my feet from the very first, and I’m standing there now like an upright slab of ice carved in the outline of a man—burning-cold and slippery-wet and glassy with congealment. I’ve put out all the lights—they all work on one switch over by the door as you come in. They’ve probably already seen the lights though if they’ve marked the window from outside, and anyway, what difference does it make? Lighted up or dark, I’m still here inside the room. It’s just some instinct as old as fear: you seek the dark when you hide, you seek the light when the need to hide is gone. All the animals have it too.

  Now they’re in, and it will take just a few minutes more while they make their arrangements. That’s all I have left, a few minutes more. Out of a time allotment that once stretched so far and limitlessly ahead of me. Who short-changed me, I feel like crying out in protest, but I know that nobody did; I short-changed myself.